


a piece of night

by kalliel



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, Hell Trauma, Post-Hell Dean, Season/Series 04, subliminal Sam/Ruby
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-29
Updated: 2011-06-29
Packaged: 2018-04-08 15:38:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 642
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4310835
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kalliel/pseuds/kalliel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean remembers his bones. S4.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a piece of night

Bones don't mean as much as they used to. Used to be, they broke. Diaphyseal facture, Frykman classifications, metacarpal shrapnel--any and all of the above, doctor jargon he'd heard enough times by the time he hit twenty they came almost as easy as _omnis immundus spiritus_. (--Not that he's ever made appropriate use of either. He doesn't, will never, know which bones go where, what Latin is actually fucking useful and which parts are just fluff. But fitting pain and di-a-phy-se-al into his mind at the same time is a hell of a lot more complicated than letting pain and jesus motherfucking shit! make nice with each other in the same small space.

And complicated is good. It's damn good.)

But it's different now. Bones. Blood. Raw, scream-ripped throats. Bones. Sometimes, it's like they all just kind of fall together like liquid slop, collapse because they've finally figured out the con--there's nothing, no one left to prop up, come on. Get real. Don't need a ribcage if there's no heart, a skeleton if you're headed nowhere. Dean's pretty sure those are song lyrics, song lyrics from somewhere, though it's been a while since he and Sam've tuned in.  

Some dickwad angel screwed the stereo to hell.

So Dean'll just have to make due with silence. Sam's taking a call somewhere. For once, Dean hopes it's a long one. He hopes Sam tells Ruby all his hopes and dreams, all the playground gossip, the dirty things written in the bathroom. Maybe even with phone sex to cherry top it off.

(His mind is wandering again. His bones and muscles checked out and his mind just took off, five hundred mile sprint to all places but here.)

Dean lies on the hood of his car, boneless. Dean lies on the hood of his car because he can't do anything else. Except breathe, _maybe_ , and then only because he's had forty years of practice learning to breathe out of his eyes and not his lungs. He looks up at the sky. He breathes stars.

"What are you doing?" Sam asks. Back-too-soon Sam.

Dean tells it to him from the top. And he knows what must sound like, because Sam asks, "Are you... _on_ something?"

"The car," Dean says.

And, "I see that," says Sam. But he doesn't say more, and he climbs up on the hood with Dean, and he looks up at the stars. Dean breathes.  
  
_Cassiopeia,_ Sam says, eventually. Before Dean can work around his bonelessness, manage some kind of gutter retort, Sam says, _It's that one, there. See? There's her throne. She's chained to it._

Huh. Cas.--Dean thinks. But Sam keeps going. _And that one--that's the Phoenix._ Sam speaks stars, names the entire sky by the time Dean finds his skeleton, can move again. Naturally, Dean's committed all Sam's names to memory, another jumble of too many syllables he'll never place correctly. But at least Sam has his shit together. There's that. Sam doesn't need to know that all those stars--they've got different names in Hell. And Dean knows them all.

  
And then--just the once--Sam says a name Dean's never heard before in clear air. It's the kind of name you can't say right with all your teeth, or all your tongue. But Sam's pronunciation is good enough, and his aim when he points to the stars is _good enough_ , and Dean wonders. Sam won't say who he learned that one from. He shrugs. "School, I guess. Maybe I'm wrong. What, suddenly you know?" And he laughs, genuinely.

Dean knows.

Dean knows, and says nothing, because Sam doesn't need to. (Sam is trying. He knows Sam is trying. Sam's just losing.)

They sit on the hood of the Impala, staring up at the sky, and Sam talks, and Sam loves, and Dean remembers his bones.

 


End file.
